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That’s exactly what I was seeing. And, as i said, in the couple examples I checked, it wasn’t showing up on my PC but was showing up OK on my phone. So, yeah, I think the problem originates with ebay…
I haven’t talked to ebay about it. I really haven’t had time. I did find this on a Facebook Group, but haven’t tried it yet. This is from a Six Bit employee apparently:
“Due to a new development with eBay that we are currently investigating, new listings are going up to eBay without the Description.
In SixBit, click File > Options > Submitting Listings and uncheck the option to “Set the contents of the Description field as the default mobile description.”
New listings should go up with the correct HTML. Existing affected listings should be fixed by highlighting them in the Check Listings > Running mode and right-click Send Revisions to Site.”
Thank you,
Clay McCarty
SixBit Customer SupportSo it sounds like this may be an ebay issue impacting Six Bit, but which also may be impacting other sellers, I don’t know. My better half doesn’t use SixBit and she hasn’t seen the issue with her listings, which leads me to believe it may be confined to Six Bit. But I don’t know for sure.
Keep us posted if you hear back from eBay. I have to get to the shipping right now, and just don’t have time to fool with this. Hoping eBay corrects it on their end without me needing to do anything, but that hope is probably misplaced LOL.
Thanks! Very helpful info!
11/06/2019 at 10:36 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 435: List and Forget, Still Works For Us #70229Mike, Jay, etc,
At present, we are ebay only, although I sometimes will put something on Facebook. I do not disagree with the idea of diversifying, (whether via diverse streams, as Jay suggests, or diverse platforms, as Mike suggests, or both). Right now, we have enough to do just trying to get caught up on ebay for Q4…sometimes life intervenes , and our best laid plans go off course.
I don’t feel a pressing need to diversify….this quarter…but ebay IS making me nervous. They spent much of Wenig’s tenure—literally, several YEARS… promising big improvements once they got “product pages” taken care of, and they are now basically back to Square One with that, and …as the latest Item Specific mess demonstrates…they STILL don’t have a real handle on it. The new guy…well, the guy who has returned to ebay, Jordan Sweetnam or whatever his name is…does seem to be stressing—FINALLY—the importance of eBay’s huge variety of merchandise, including the collectible stuff, the used stuff, etc. BUT: They just aren’t growing, they are spinning their wheels while their competitors grow around them.
All of that wouldn’t bother me TOO much, because I’ve gotten used to it, but the Elliot Management situation is the Wild Card. I think we have to recognize the very real possibility that if ebay doesn’t DRAMATICALLY turn things around, ebay will be sold off and perhaps dismantled. A sale to the right buyer could actually be the best thing for us as sellers…or the worst. There’s just no way to know, and I think every day that goes by without signs of REAL growth—-GMV growth—is another nail in ebay’s coffin. Yes, they can goose revenue with Promoted Listing revenue and eventually Managed Payments revenue, but they can’t continue to lose market share. At some point, investors are going to insist on evidence of a real turn around. Frankly, the Board gave Wenig more time than I expected they would….maybe because he kept telling them the turn around was getting closer, just be patient….but I think they are running out of patience. I’m guessing ebay has maybe another year, at best, to show it can turn things around. A strong Q4 would help, but I wouldn’t bet on it happening….especially with the IS mess right now.
Ultimately, I think they need to make some pretty drastic changes, or sink.
Sounds like a great plan! And yep, just keep plugging away….slow and steady wins the race…
VintageTreasures,
I think you are right…this is just some new wording from ebay, but it is independent of the buyer’s actual offer…the offer could be a terrible low ball, or a completely reasonable offer, and ebay will provide the same advice to the seller.
Since I usually have a fair bit of wiggle room, before I respond I’ll often check to see if there are currently any identical or similar items listed, and at what prices. As a scavenger seller, some of my stuff has been sitting a long time, and price points can change over time.
I started out, long before ebay existed, as a flea market seller, and so low ball offers don’t bother me , it’s just part of the game.
I agree with ebay that sales tax is probably a factor in the US (although not the only factor). But there are a number of things at work here, including the fact that ebay’s US market makes up about 40% and foreign makes up about 60%….so I’d guess the uncertainty surrounding Brexit and so forth, all of that may play a role as well.
But the main problem is probably the same as it has been for some years now….ebay hasn’t defined itself in a way that gives buyers reason to shop on ebay rather than elsewhere. And increasingly its not giving sellers enough reason to sell on ebay either, given the rise of sites like Mercari, Posh, etc….
The amazing thing to me, is that ebay has lasted this long….ebay’s early success was built in large part on its entertainment value….auctions were fun at a time when there wasn’t a whole lot of really fun stuff online. But the rise of video, online gaming, social media etc….all of that killed ebay as the fun thing to do while sitting at the computer. Without the fun factor, it has become just another place to shop online, and there’s nothing exciting about that. I think inertia has kept ebay alive , buyers and sellers who are used to it keep using it, but drawing new people into it? That’s hard, because…well, what’s the draw?
oooh, Sharyn, thanks for the tip! I just ordered some of those boxes! Hope they keep adding to the selection!
Retro, Congrats on the weight loss! Any specific diet, exercise plan?
I’ve lost about 15 pounds since July, which pales in comparison to your loss, but I haven’t really been exercising and it’s not a strict diet of any sort….mostly I just don’t eat anything after the evening meal.
With PC, mobile, or both?
Mighty Brilliant, I just listed an item, then added PL to it, and what I’m seeing is: Only the organic listing in Best Match, but I am seeing organic and promoted in all the other search orders. Were you seeing the two in Best Match, or some other search order (such as Highest to Lowest, etc)
“Last week, 15 of 51 items we sold were Promoted Listings. That’s more than 20%. Would they have sold otherwise? Difficult to tell.”
Jay, When PL first started, I was always asking myself that question. I finally concluded there’s no way to know for sure, and, more importantly, I don’t really care. What I care about is this:
1. PL costs me nothing up front, except a little bit of time.
2. I think like most scavenger sellers, most of my items have huge margins compared to sellers of new commodity goods. Can I afford to run a 25% off sale on most of my stuff, without changing prices? Sure. Because I’ll still make good money. By the same token, can I give ebay a few extra FVF percentage points on my stuff by using PLs? Sure, because I’m still going to make good money. Just two different ways to try to increase my sales velocity. Truth is, when I sell something with 25% off, I have no way of knowing if it would have sold eventually at full price, but I don’t really care. I made the sale, I made a decent profit, the item is gone so I’ve made room for something else….I’m happy. LOL
“I think the people who buy promoted listings are not all that smart generally, or don’t care about price. The kind of person that just goes to the default search box and does one search. So yeah, more or less a non-issue.”
I’m not sure I’d say they don’t care about price, but I do think most people are not as price conscious as we scavengers are. The better half and I joke about this: Even buying stuff at WalMart can give us sticker shock. I think we’d both drop dead in more upscale shops. LOL That’s because most of what we buy—for our own use, as well as resale—comes from yard sales, thrift stores, flea markets, and we get a lot of our groceries at farmers markets or some of the Amish discount groceries we have around here. My smart phone was ten bucks at a yard sale. I mostly use it for ebay price research. It works fine for that. And it’s very easy to sort of assume everybody shops that way, but most people don’t. Most people think they are doing well if they clip coupons or get a 10% off sale.
The flip side of that is, we have to “shift gears” when we price stuff to list because we are pricing at prices we would never be willing to pay, and sometimes its hard to get out of the “Well, I paid a buck for this, so if I sell if for ten I’m fine, and no one will give me more” mindset. But when the sold data shows proves there are people who will give you $100, well, then $100 it is. LOL
I guess what I’m saying is: we tend to forget we are NOT the average consumer.
The ability to block via ad blockers has been there for a long time. It’s not new. It’s just that it is not the default setting for most ad blockers, and , as ebay notes, very few people actually go to the trouble of changing the setting. So, while it CAN be done, I don’t worry about buyers doing it, because most of them won’t. And, as JamesC notes, most of those who will block are probably mostly people who have sworn never to buy a promoted listing anyway. Which is OK by me. There are plenty of people who WILL buy a PL…..the number who won’t is low enough to be inconsequential.
In addition, what James C is complaining about is: PLs don’t really make sense in any search order other than Best Match. The fact that ebay sticks them in search orders such as “lowest first” is an issue, and it is one that ebay appears to be working on. It seems that two teams are involved, the search team and the PL team, so I suspect it may be a while before ebay resolves it.
But again, as a seller, it doesn’t bother me. Just as only a small percentage of buyers will use a non-default setting on their ad blockers, so only a small percentage of buyers will use anything but the default Best Match search order. I’d bet most buyers don’t even know there are optional search orders.
So, I’ll just continue using PL and I’ll continue selling.
10/03/2019 at 10:02 am in reply to: Interesting Promoted Listing "Trending Rate" Inconsistency #68552Jay,
The PL team —internally, at ebay—is NOT judged by how many sellers they can convince to choose high rates. The team is NOT even really judged by the dollar volume of fees they collect (although that is a figure ebay is happier to share with stockholders LOL).
The team IS judged by their conversion success rate. Think about what that means. It means that the team has every reason to want to promote listings that have the best chance of selling. Yes, I would say if two listings are of basically equal quality, the PL rate may be the tie breaking factor. But poor listings aren’t usually going to rise to the top just because they have a high PL rate. Not when there are much better listings , even if they have lower rates.
ebay has been sending this message: create the best listing you can. THEN consider using PL. But if you really want PL to be most effective, start with a really good listing.
And again, to me there’s a big difference between selling new commodity goods in competitive categories with PL, and selling our long tail stuff. Even ebay has now acknowledged this, and has basically said the trending rate is less important for our kind of stuff….
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